Mike

Social media is a funny old thing, mainly beyond awful, but occasionally useful.

A couple of weeks ago, a post that I noticed on Facebook saved me, I suppose, a wasted round trip of 74 miles, from Carlisle to Keswick and back. That was as good as it got. Everything else about that post, and indeed about the entire story, is just incredibly sad.

For what the post said was that my old friend, Mike Town, the old friend I was planning to stay with after a talk I was giving in Carlisle, had died unexpectedly. Mike, who never married, lived alone, and so the first I would have known would presumably have been a locked door at 9.00pm last Wednesday. In a strange way, I wasn’t as shocked as I could have been: the last three times that I had stayed with, or visited him, he had excused himself from climbing a fell with me- (or ‘bump’, as he would have called it)- on the grounds of some problem with his heart that would be sorted when his name climbed to the top of the local waiting list. I have not yet heard what took him, but I am left to imagine that his heart condition deteriorated faster than Wes Streeting managed to get the local waiting list down.

Mike was 76, so you could be tempted to say that he had enjoyed a good knock. Any of you who knew him would understand me when I say that he was 76 in age only; everything else about him was lodged somewhere between fascinated schoolboy and career enthusiast. When I look at the various directions that my own adult life took, I can identify four people outside of my family who heavily influenced its course. Mike was one of them.

Mike was a young teacher when he introduced this apathetic and rater morose teenager to the mountains. Not just to the mountains, but to the general idea that there is more to be found beyond the streetlights than under their comforting glare, and more to be experienced by poking ones nose around the next headland, and the next one after that, than there ever could be in stopping or turning back. In a way, this eventually paved the way for two of my three careers.

Powered by his always understated enthusiasm, I started to find something that I was curiously good at…walking, and particularly walking up and down hills. You might not think that this is much but, when you are dealing with someone who at the time was interested in almost nothing, you will soon see that this is huge. The more I went, the more I wanted more. And the more I got more, the more I threw myself in to first helping out with, and then helping run the Mountaineering Club. The enthusiasm propelled me into the army, the long-term effects of which have provided much of the fuel for the rest of my life.

After I had left, I kept firmly in touch. First whilst he was a housemaster (the youngest in the school’s history, as it happens,) and then as a regular visitor to his Keswick lair, especially after he had retired up there. Famously, he had a vocabulary all of his own which still punctuates my thoughts when they are on him. He tried in vain to interest me in his other passions- meteorology, martial arts, Cumbrian wrestling and the restoration and playing of church organs- but it was the hills that we always shared. (Having said that, it was typical of his unfussy loyalty that he drove a 660 mile round trip to play the organ at Caroline and my wedding 32 years ago. He ended up doing the same at 849 other weddings). Of the 214 ‘Wainwrights’ designated in the lake District, he and I climbed over 150 together, some multiple times. The last time I saw him, a few months ago, we argued cordially and respectfully about climate change over a bottle of single malt and a large bar of Toblerone. The last time we spoke, it was for him to invite me to come and stay yet again, after my talk in Carlisle.

We are all of us blessed by the people who take an interest in our lives, much more so when that interest first knocks at the door at a barren time. Sometimes, we only realise after they have gone exactly what it was that they had given us.

In a loud world, he was quietly brilliant.

RIP, Mike.